Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“Bridging the Chasm”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Psalm 146; 1 Timothy 6:6-19: Luke 16:19-31
There are some things that I don’t understand about nature; specifically, creatures in nature. I don’t understand how there can be life in the black depths of the sea. I don’t understand how cockroaches, as creepy and pesky as they are, can be among the most likely species to outlive most others on this planet. I don’t understand what makes those little fire ants like our front yard so much here at Friends Church. And I don’t understand why some mothers will find a flaw of some sort on their young and then leave them for dead after they’re born.
I shared a story once in a Wednesday night serve a while back about how I experienced this up close. When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I had a cat named Stripe. She was a calico with a white streak of hair that divided her ears on the top of her head and extended down to between her eyes. One of the greatest movies of all time, Gremlins, had come out only a few years before this, and the leading villain of that movie was a Gremlin named Stripe who had a white Mohawk setting him apart from his other Gremlin peers. Hence, me, being a loyal child of the 80s, naming my pet cat ‘Stripe.’
Stripe got pregnant before Mom and Dad could get her neutered, and the day was upon us when she would give birth. My dad remains to this day an unapologetic animal hater, and he especially loathes cats and looks at those years when my brother and I owned cats as a particularly dark time in his domestic life. But wouldn’t you know it: when the time came for Stripe to give birth, Dad was Johnny on the spot. He was the kind, warm caregiver helping Stripe birth her litter into the world one kitten at a time on the bathroom floor of our house.
And one by one, the kittens clung to their mother for milk, except for one. This one kitten couldn’t find a place among the litter to get milk from its mother, and when Dad held the kitten up to its mother’s face, Stripe just looked away. Seemed like she was saying, “I don’t want it.”
Mom called the vet to see what we could do to save this kitten, and they said, “All you can really do is tie a knot in the umbilical cord and hold the kitten to give it warmth.” I did that, but it didn’t work. We lost that kitten, and my parents were left with a daunting challenge for any parent: They had to make sense of this travesty and explain it to my brothers and me so that we would be able to accept it.
This is just one of so many mysteries about nature that we all have to accept. We might never understand these mysteries of nature, but we have to accept them. In my opinion, I think that’s healthy. It’s kind of part of the growth and maturing process: to appreciate and accept certain things about nature. But it is the exact opposite when we apply this to humankind.
It’s one thing to accept that some of the litter won’t make it because that’s just not what nature intended, or to accept that some animals simply wander off to die when it’s their time. But it’s an injustice to apply this thinking to human beings. It’s just bad theology, and for centuries we have practiced this in our faith circles.
This is what I mean: In Deuteronomy 28:2-5, Moses says this: “All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God: You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock—the calves of your herds and the lambs of your flocks. Your basket and your kneading trough will be blessed.” Etc.
For centuries, well-intentioned people of faith have understood messages like this to mean that if you prosper in this life, then you have found favor with God. If you’re healthy, if you look good, if you have money in the bank and maybe a handsome 401K, then God thinks you’re aces. And if you don’t succeed in this life, or if you are stricken with illness or poverty or some kind of tragedy, then God doesn’t like you.
Remember Job? Job: arguably the most faithful servant of God next to Jesus Christ. Job loses everything. He loses his family, his livestock, his way of living. His body is covered with sores, and he plucks at them with shards of broken pottery. And in his darkest hour of need, his friends come to his side, only to tell him that he’s probably doing something wrong.
Instead of comforting Job or doing something to help him, Job’s friends try to make sense of the situation—they try to get Job to accept the mess that he’s in by insisting that it’s all his fault. “Job, trust us. You’ll feel better once you accept that you just don’t have favor with God. Good fortune can’t be in the cards for you, my man, because God obviously doesn’t like you. Your plight is part of the plan. You deserve this. Accept that.”
To say to the Jobs of our present day that they must accept their plight because God doesn’t find favor with them is just bad theology. And how many times do you hear the moral authorities of this world sounding like Job’s friends? How many times have you seen it on pundit TV shows that hide under the guise of news, or from the mouths of your family, friends, peers and co-workers? How many times have you heard those moral judgments dripping from your own mouth?
“Her husband up and left her. She must not have what it takes to be a good wife. Makes sense.”
“Their teenage son is a complete nightmare, and now he’s ended up in ‘juvie.’ They probably didn’t spend enough time with him when he was a child. Makes sense.”
“That young man was filled with promise, but then he got HIV. Must be God’s punishment for something he did. Makes sense.”
And to be more in the context of what Jesus is getting at today, how many times have you heard it said: “The poor deserve what they get, and that’s all they deserve.”?
For the most part we accept that people’s plight is just the way it is. “That’s just the nature of things for the poor to be poor and the rich to be rich.” And as this chasm grows between the rich and the poor all around us, we all suffer from this ridiculous myth.
Jesus tells a story about a rich man who does nothing in his life to help the poor man who suffers from hunger and bad health just outside the gate of his mansion. We see the injustice (It’s like we’re watching TV.); we see the chasm that separates these two men, and we hope for some kind of change. And then it happens: both men die, and the poor man ends up with Father Abraham in heaven, and the rich man is cast down into Hades for eternity.
But Jesus doesn’t tell stories like this to scare us or to assure us. Jesus never tells a story and leaves it at that: “That’s just the way it is,” says Jesus, “The rich spend eternity in Hades and the poor get to heaven.” Jesus never says to us, “That’s just the way it is.” Jesus always says to us, “Here’s the story, and this story is about you. Now that you’ve heard this story, what are you going to do about it?”
The story mentions heaven and hell and the great chasm that separates the poor man who is exalted and the rich man who is punished for his arrogance, but the story is about change. It’s about repentance, and repentance is change. The story is Jesus’ way of turning our social outlook on its head.
Jesus is preaching here, and he’s preaching about how we are separated in this world. We are separated, one from another, by our arrogance, our stubborn unwillingness to help one another. We are separated by a social myth that things are the way that they are, and nothing’s going to change that in this life. And the more we buy into that myth, the wider that chasm becomes that separates us, one from another, just like a rich man is separated from a poor man.
And Jesus doesn’t tell today’s story so that we would look ahead to a time when everything is made right. Jesus tells this story to change our thinking from acceptance to restlessness. And it’s out of this restlessness that we are spurred to action. It’s been said that the human heart is restless in this life until we find rest with God. Well, what are we doing with that restlessness? Are we doing everything that we can to bring about heaven on earth, or are we just accepting things the way they are and helping to establish hell on earth by our stubbornness? Are we building God’s kingdom of love—heaven on earth—or are we digging the chasm that separates us one from another—hell on earth?
Now, I want to speak clearly this morning to two examples about our church: First of all, this church has been an Open & Affirming church since 1996. It took two years of faithful discussion, study, dialogue, fellowship and worship together for this community of faith at Friends to come to the shared decision that all of God’s children are not only welcome in this place but all are equally called to discipleship and to this labor of love that we might call kingdom living. That, to me, sounds like some devoted people of faith hearing Jesus’ story not as a means to an end, but as a charge to service.
The Open & Affirming stance this church publicly takes says that everyone is welcome here to be and live and worship and work and to love one another in the name of Christ regardless of who we are or where we come from, regardless of our gender, ethnicity, social status or sexual orientation. This is one step closer to heaven on earth. This is bridging the chasm. This is hearing Christ’s story and not just accepting it, but learning from it and changing our lives so that others’ lives might be changed along with us. That’s good theology.
Here’s the second part: For years we have been devoted to something called the Angel Tree Ministry at Friends. Every Christmas we take part in the Angel Tree ministry by receiving information about children in our community whose parents are in prison. These parents are separated from their children and can’t provide them with presents at Christmas, so we step in and help out by anonymously providing gifts to these children. Not only are incarcerated parents separated from their children, society is separated from this tragic situation…if we choose to be. Angel Tree ministry is our way of refusing to accept a situation like this and to be agents of social change in the name of Christ. It’s another way for us to bridge the chasm.
Read the letter from Prison Fellowship, stating that Friends Congregational Church is now disqualified from participating in Angel Tree Ministry on the basis that we are not a Trinitarian church, and that we do not uphold the authority of scripture in all matters of faith and life.
When I received this news, on a weekday afternoon recently, I was sad. This really took the wind out of my sails. Your heart might be in your stomach right now. Or you might be so mad that you want to spit. You might just be flat-out confused. Well, any of these responses is perfectly OK. What we do with these emotions is what is crucial for us, my friends.
Here are the facts: Friends Congregational Church has been stripped of a ministry where we help to bridge a chasm between those who are in dire need of joy and love, and those of us who might take this kind of joy and love for granted. We don’t accept this separation any more than we should accept this country’s structural separation between the rich and poor. Now that this fact is in our lap, what will we do?
The truth is that we can’t be followers of a God of justice, mercy and love if we stubbornly believe that it is God’s will for the poor to be poor and the rich to be rich, for the healthy to be hopeful and the sick to be hopeless, or for the alienated to be oppressed and for the accepted to be embraced. We can’t have it both ways. God is love or God is not. God stands for justice or God does not. God is the Divine Shepherd who cares for all of the sheep of this flock we call humankind, or God doesn’t care for any of them.
Our sisters and brothers at Prison Fellowship have opted to have it both ways. We can either accept their decision as being just the way it is, or we can do something about it. We can either let our emotional responses that are inundating our senses right now pour into the chasm that already divides us, one from another, or we can take a deep breath and start bridging the chasm.
I have written a letter in response to this one that we received from Prison Fellowship, and in it I try to speak from the voice of not only this congregation, but also our community. This decision to disqualify Friends from the Angel Tree ministry not only affects us and our children, it affects the children we have helped for years who will now go without at Christmas, and it could affect anyone in our community who would hear this story and agree that this is an atrocious injustice.
This week I urge you to go to our church’s website and view this letter: www.friends-ucc.org. Read it. Read it again, and send your comments and concerns to us at the email listed on the website. Our Steering Committee has viewed the letter, as well, and the version that will be placed on our website is a second draft according to the Steering Committtee’s observations.
Next Sunday in worship and the following Wednesday night in worship, we will have the opportunity to sign this letter. It will then be sent to the national and regional offices of Prison Fellowship as our shared response to what we choose not to accept. God, after all, is still speaking.
But here is another fact: We will not change their mind, and that is not the intent of the letter. We can, however, bring awareness to this situation in our community and how we are all being affected by this. We might even change some minds in the process. So, I encourage you to talk about this around the water cooler this week. Talk to your friends, your co-workers, your family…anyone you can…and let them know what’s going on at our church. Talk about it and invite them to worship with us next Sunday or Wednesday so that they can have the chance to sign off on this letter with us.
Our vision and mission statement say that we extend God’s extravagant welcome to all, so invite your friends to be with us. Your invitation could be a way of bridging the chasm that exists between you and someone you love.
Friends, are we accepting the myths that build up hell on earth, or are we acting on our restlessness and building up a kingdom where all come to know the mercy, love and justice of God? Are we building up heaven on earth? Let’s get to work. Amen.